dvgrn wrote:Lots of ways to cut even [Calcyman's smaller p59] down -- in area, anyway, at the cost of a few more Snarks. Here's another draft:x = 405, y = 355 ...Looks like it's also possible to connect the glider outputs to different glider inputs -- it might be worth avoiding the nested loops.

Swapping the connections around does work pretty well, as it turns out -- brings the p59 gun down below 300x300:

Some new optimization ideas will be needed to improve this much further, though it might be possible to bend down the top and bottom corners a bit more, to get down maybe as low as 299x211. I'll let someone else get a little Snark-chaining practice for that last fix --!

This stage of the search selects interesting partial results using a classifier based on a neural network of approximately 10^11 nodes which was generated using a genetic algorithm over a timespan of several hundred million years.

Hmm... I'm starting to think that because of my humble 1 GB, Intel Core 2 CPU T5600 @ 1.83GHz, I can consider myself one of the 99%...

I suspect the appearance of the Snark has made symmetrical Herschel-loop guns mostly obsolete in the gun collection. Except for the really small loops (p256, p448, etc.) there will now generally be ways to "bootstrap" a short section of Herschel track with its own output gliders.

Once you have a Herschel factory with the right period, you can extract as many more gliders as you want, with the right phases and square colors, just by adding a few more Herschel conduits. Here's a first attempt:

It may well be possible to improve the Herschel track; this was just the first thing I tried that worked. The last glider in particular seems to need a ridiculously long Snark chain to get it synchronized correctly.

There are also a couple of glider outputs that I couldn't use. Quite possibly there's a way to route these to some kind of eater (tub-with-tail and block, or whatever) to produce a p86 spark. The spark could then reflect another out-of-phase or wrong-color glider stream to correct the phase or color.

[This seems like a good theory, but I'm very short of practical examples.]

I've noticed that sometimes Bellman crashes with a message like the one below. It seems less likely to happen when my ????? region is below the pattern, but I don't see any obvious way to reproduce or avoid it. Is there something I'm missing? Is a fix on the way, assuming it's a bug?

Firstly, loop -> "oblique hat" reaction. Since the "oblique hat" is not stable, it should have been synchronized with a known 4-glider synthesis of the tail. A tough task here was to find reactions that wouldn't conflict with each other.

Secondly, eater -> integral reaction. It is different from a known reaction (above) in that it requires only 3 instead of 4 gliders and it is also much less fastidious to its surroundings. This is perhaps the most reusable finding of all three.

One of the things I was thinking of doing this weekend was to rummage around my disorganized constructions files to see what parts I had that would work, and what gaps needed filling, and now I don't have to do that.

That's awesome. With just a few finishing touches (using seven gliders) we have a completed snark synthesis! Just for reference here are the three extra steps that complete the rest of the snark, as well as it reflecting a glider to show that it is complete:

Now I wish I knew of a script to move a glider backwards an arbitrary number of generations; that would make turning an incremental synthesis into a full synthesis alot easier. (If anyone has or knows of one that isn't in perl, I'd like to know. Thanks!)

Actually, the block can be constructed with just one glider The loop -> "oblique hat" reaction produces a beehive as a side product. If the latter is not removed, it does not affect any further syntheses. But afterwards it can be transformed into a block in just the right place with 2 gliders. Since one glider would have to be used to remove the beehive, it saves 1 glider in total. There is more than one way to do it, here is one of them.

pcallahan wrote:I've noticed that sometimes Bellman crashes with a message like the one below. It seems less likely to happen when my ????? region is below the pattern, but I don't see any obvious way to reproduce or avoid it. Is there something I'm missing? Is a fix on the way, assuming it's a bug?

TODO: handle tile wrap! (46, 24, 0)

Yes, it's a bug (or at least something that hasn't been implemented yet). I need to find some time to update it to fix this and a few other issues - at the time I thought it was more important to get it online so that others could try to use it. Sorry about that!

As codeholic points out, you can work around it for now by making sure there are no '?' cells at the edges of the pattern by adding a border of '.'s.

Sphenocorona wrote:Now I wish I knew of a script to move a glider backwards an arbitrary number of generations; that would make turning an incremental synthesis into a full synthesis alot easier. (If anyone has or knows of one that isn't in perl, I'd like to know. Thanks!)

Six years ago I got partway through writing a "glider-rewinder" Python script. Amazingly, there's still a surviving copy on my laptop. This may be an insurmountable opportunity -- I'll post a copy on the Scripts thread if I can get it working. Meanwhile, Golly's standard shift.py is a good general-purpose substitute.

The first is a 4-glider loop synthesis Bob Shemyakin found in 2012,reducing the cost by one.

The second is old 5-glider method for the last step in the still-lifesynthesis that is one cheaper than what was used here.

The third is an older (and now largely obsolete) way to turn aneater into an integral from the side (which could also have beenused). The new 3-glider method is much cheaper and less obtrusive,so this will likely have limited use now.

Which version of the snark should we use? Playle's original, the one above by Koenig, or something else? I've got a feeling that Koenig's is the best. He provided evidence that his version's glider synthesis would be much cheaper than the original 50-glider synthesis. As it turns out, only three gliders are required to destroy Koenig's snark, as compared to five for the original: